Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems hasn't been fully sanctioned by anti-trust entities and Oracle already has a message for customers: we'll continue to care intensively about SPARC and Solaris. Something's missing here: MySQL.

On a website declaration to Sun customers, the database giant promises them strengthened investment in SPARC and the Solaris platform, in fact doubling the sales and service force for these two products. By integrating Sun software with its own, Oracle also plans to improve Sun's hardware performance. Meanwhile any search for mention of the MySQL database is fruitless. This omission seems to be on the minds of the European anti-trust commission when considering Larry Ellison's purchase of Sun in April 2009 for $7.4 million.

The European Commission in Brussels issued a press release September 3 voicing "serious doubts" about the competitiveness of the resulting database market. Competition commissioner Neelie Kroes clarifies: "The Commission has to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world's leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world's leading open source database company." The U.S. Justice Department has already given the takeover a green light, with the European commission the last obstacle in its path. The commission should make its decision before January 19, 2010.

The missing reference to MySQL among Oracle's promises to Sun customers certainly raised a red flag to the EU commission. Oracle makes it quite clear in its declaration where its competitive focus will be with a quote from Larry Ellison: "We're in it to win. IBM, we're looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business." IBM meanwhile has its own plans for luring Sun/Oracle customers with its DB2 bundles.

In Munich, Wednesday, March 10, Oracle announced its upcoming strategy for the Sun takeover: the new couple will now sell complete packages and, next to Oracle's database, further develop Solaris along with Sun's SPARC and Flashfire server technologies.